“Consolation for My Cancer” by Claire Gilbert (+) Nomad Podcast Interview w/ Ms. Gilbert

SufferingSpirituality

Nov 20

Written By Wisdom2be

🔷 Interview starts at 16min / 15sec.

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BLOG | BY CLAIRE GILBERT | MAR 25, 2021

Cancer consolations: why reading The Oldie is essential rehab for chemotherapy.

By Claire Gilbert

In March 2019 I was diagnosed with Myeloma, an incurable cancer of the bone marrow. I have been in treatment ever since, in an attempt to send the cancer into deep remission.

You have to submit to the treatment. Thank heavens I am, at Guy’s Hospital, among world class haematologists and oncologists and clinical nurse specialists who are easy to trust. That helps. But I don’t really understand the science and it is utterly counter intuitive to allow a substance to be infused into your body that makes you feel dreadful when you had felt - because the cancer was found early - perfectly well.

How would I cope?

I asked a group of friends and family if they would be my Dear Readers and I write to them: their gift to me is simply to read, they don’t have to respond, though lots of them do. I write unexpurgated, raw words from my most vulnerable self: the Dear Readers are spared none of my pain, and none of the fierce joy that I have discovered in the midst of the pain. And they have learnt what brings comfort to a tormented body: nature, music, Julian of Norwich... and The Oldie.

Michael McCarthy has reminded us of the therapeutic value of nature. In his 2015 book The Moth Snowstorm, and again in his co-authored 2020 book The Consolation of Nature, he cites the gently groundbreaking study by Roger Ulrich in 1982, which demonstrated that patients who wake up after surgery to a view of greenery outside their window recover significantly faster than those who wake up to a vision of a brick wall. More recent research commissioned by Natural England in 2016 showed significant benefits of nature-based interventions for mental health care. In her 2016 book The Fight for Beauty, former Director-General of the National Trust Fiona Reynolds argues for the fundamental need humans have for natural beauty: it is not a luxury. And heavens has it helped me:

Friday 18 January 2019

IT’S 20 hours since Dr Adam told me I have a protein that might be myeloma, a cancer of the blood. What an extraordinary and yet utterly ordinary thing to be told: that you might have a life-threatening condition, that you might die.

Because of course I am going to die anyway.

The one certainty about being born is that one’s life will end. And the shock of its possibility, perhaps sooner than one thought (but one doesn’t think, that’s the truth of it) is, I am finding, rather liberating.

At last: an absolute in my life that puts everything else into perspective.

I am breathing the air, loving Seán, connecting with Nutkin, the horse I ride this morning, seeing the sky, adoring the view of the Old Town from my eyrie in our house in Hastings, receiving the mighty view of the sea, enjoying the crunchy tang of an apple, and so on and so on: accepting the present moment and loving it.

And I’m not finding myself thinking that I will miss it, nor that I want to hang on to it. It is so precious, and it is itself. It will survive me and that matters more, now.

I was in the pub in Hastings Old Town when the doctor phoned. Sitting enjoying a pint with Seán, just off the London train. Dr Adam said: If you do have it, the treatments aren’t too bad. You don’t get sick or lose your hair or anything.

But still. Cancer.

I went to the cloakroom and looked straight into my own eyes in the mirror above the sink, and I saw strength enough for this. I shall — I shall — be a good companion for myself on this journey, whatever it entails (and it may entail nothing).

The Damocles’ sword of cancer has hung over me and you, my dear siblings, for a long time. It’s what our family dies of if the last two generations are anything to go by. I have been silently waiting for one of us to succumb.

And in contemplating the possibility that it might be me, I make the discovery that it is (at the moment, anyway) worse to be the loved one of the ill one, rather than the ill one herself.

When it happens to you, you face it. When it happens to one whom you love, it undoes you.
Cancer — illness, death — is profoundly social. And that is going to make it much, much harder.
For, however ready I might be to face my own death, Seán is determined that I will outlive him. He declaims as much with the voice of God over the dinner table that night. And how can I wish to die before him? His wife died suddenly, in a car crash, too soon.

Sunday, 20 January 2019

DEEP tears rising to just below the surface of me. I resolutely think of other things, or repeat maranatha (an Aramaic mantra meaning “Come, Lord”) like a talisman.

I do not allow myself to investigate “myeloma” online; the endless imaginings and plannings that will attend knowing the prognosis and treatment should be delayed as long as possible, ideally until after I know for certain that I have it — for, of course, I may not.

Today I feel so well, so normal, and Seán really is not well, that it seems indulgent to imagine anything about cancer and dying and death for myself. The deep tears abate.

Dr Adam rang again yesterday to talk about checking his diagnosis. He is a nephrologist: I had gone to him to have my kidneys checked. He needs to hand me over to the oncologists.

I can’t do anything about this until tomorrow. Agitation and unhappiness flare up over organising the necessary tests. Death I can face, I think, but endless complicated arrangements for its prologue distress me.

I read Lucia in London by E. F. Benson. It happens to be the book I am reading here in Hastings, and its frivolity irritates me, but then it quickly becomes a comedy so charming and delightful that it brings life back to my life. Benson makes me relish what is, in all its absurd beauty.

Monday, 21 January

I AM scared. Today we travel back to London and I have to start taking action to find out if this blessed protein is cancerous. I have to tell some close colleagues the situation because I may not be able to keep my countenance and they should know why.

But it will be shocking: the fact that nothing is yet confirmed does not stop imaginations firing up.

I can work. I have decided what I am going to say in my lecture on justice in public life. Thank God, thank God for work and the ability to focus.

On my own in the evening, I drink champagne, toasting l’chaim. Life. The great teaching in this time for me is to do what, citing Plato, I have advocated for decades: live as though you are going to die today. And that brings life to life like nothing else: vibrant, shouting, dancing, loving life. The champagne is vintage and delicious.
I weep. Just below the surface there are not only exquisitely painful tears whose origin is deep within me, but also a pumping stress. I can think calmly of only one thing at a time, so that is what I shall do. If I start to multiply my tasks and decisions, I am immediately in distress.

No appointments yet. You tell me this is the hardest time, J, you who have had cancer: when you don’t yet know.

My way of dealing with it is to let myself imagine the worst (whether that is outright death or ghastly ongoing treatments I’m not sure — the latter I think), but very gently, as though probing a tender wound, a place of great hurt and vulnerability. It hurts but it is life-giving.

I’m trying an imaginative exercise of letting love flow into my blood and around my body, imagining the love washing through my blood and all the cells and proteins in my blood, so if the cancer is there it is being washed in love.

Fr Eamonn speaks at mass about the story of the wedding feast at Cana in relation to what Jesus offers when we are nothing but jars of water: if I am empty of everything and don’t have anything left to give, his miraculous grace gives me not just more of the same, but a transformed self.

Yes. Cana wine. I can try that.

Tuesday, 22 May 2019

Today I wake to a brave new world, my bursting appreciation matching the depth of my earlier despairing nausea and fever (does one have to have the ghastliness before one can have the joy?). The lowering skies have lifted, the sun shines on a glittering sea, the smell of summer is everywhere. Today I ride and I don’t think I have the words to express how joyful that feels... I ride big, strong Denby, sturdy as a mountain, and drink in all of nature, rolling hills, abundant oaks, ancient beech, a buzzard hovering, wending our way through overgrown paths and cantering along the trampoline field and the uppey-downy field, birdsong, the smells richer than I have ever known them.

Music has fed my soul and healed my quaking psyche. When I had to go to hospital for a stem cell transplant, I asked each of the Dear Readers to name a piece of music which they loved. I created a playlist of the sound of my friends’ souls which brought solace to my soul as I lay supine and helpless and sick to death.

Friday 8th November 2019

The cruelty of Melphalan, destroying my alimentary canal when I need it so badly to get well again. Nausea and diarrhoea; nausea and diarrhoea. I cannot clean my teeth. I sweat...

I listen to my Dear Reader playlist. It is on shuffle as I am absolutely incapable of making choices. But the right music plays: Finzi’s ‘Life is a flower in springtime’; Mozart’s requiem with his commanding ‘light perpetual shine on you’; Leonard Cohen’s ‘You want it darker (I’m ready, Lord)’. The music sings in my soul, rallying my spirit, accompanying and articulating my pain and confusion and utter vulnerability when I have no resources of my own, nothing.

Julian of Norwich is my constant companion. She had a series of revelations when she was very close to death in 1373 and wrote about them in the decades that followed, almost certainly from the isolation of an anchorhold abutting the Church of St Julian in Norwich. Her writing is exquisite:

Sunday, 17th November 2019

From the depths of my heart, thank you, I [a Dear Reader], for this quotation from Julian that landed in my inbox at exactly the right moment:

He said not ‘Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased’; but he said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome’.’

And The Oldie has kept me sane from the start:

Sunday 12th May 2019 Saturday. Was. S***.

I wasn’t actually sick (burp not retch, thank God) but I was in that awful no-mans- land of not knowing if I was nauseous or hungry... I could only lie on the sofa and gently moan, dutifully swallowing my drugs and my water... I read the gently humorous and utterly comforting Oldie from cover to cover.

SOURCE: The Oldie

SOURCE: The Church Times

SOURCE: “Miles To Go Before I Sleep” by Claire Gilbert

SOURCE: Nomad Podcast

Claire GilbertNomad PodcastJulian of Norwich